Houston businessman Farid Seif carries a .40 caliber Glock handgun for protection and forgot that it was in his computer bag when he went to the airport. No problem though. It was in the bag, not in his crotch, so he didn't get caught and thrown in jail. In fact, he didn't even remember it was in there until he landed. Good thing we're groping those airline passengers. The system is working!

10 December 2010

Short version: police take money ($190,000, their life savings) from two brothers who remodel homes, they suspect that the brothers are drug dealers, no evidence is found, drug-sniffing dog can't find any evidence, no charges brought, police refuse to give the money back, court demands they give it back, city and police refuse. Sounds fair. (rolls eyes)

09 December 2010

If you thought that the Republicans were going to somehow magically transform into responsible politicians, I'm afraid you were drunk. (Also, there's no such thing as fairies) They just put Hal Rogers in as the Chair of the House Appropriations Committee. To give you an idea of what kind of Representative he has been, here is ReasonTV's Porker of the Month video from August.

07 December 2010

Radley Balko with Reason is consistently on top of police-abuse stories and he has written an exhaustive article about the recent trend toward keeping people from filming or audio-recording police while they're doing their job. I think this is a dangerous trend and a clear violation of our rights. Mr. Balko has covered multiple stories of recordings directly contradicting police testimony. If not for those recordings, the accused would have been punished for actions that they did not commit. Police officers are, for the most part, honorable people trying to protect their communities, but they are in a position of extreme power over the community and that requires checks and balances from the community. Recording encounters with the police is the obvious solution to police abuse.

05 December 2010

I don't usually post entire articles here, but I just got done reading Lawrence Reed's article from the July/August 2009 copy of The Freeman. I frequently find myself pessimistic about the odds of liberty prevailing and whenever I do I go to Lawrence Reed for a boost. So without further ado, here is his article "Give Up? Are You Kidding?"

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated. –Thomas Paine

So began the first of 16 pamphlets under the title “The American Crisis,” by patriot Thomas Paine. These very words were read aloud to General George Washington’s forlorn and bedraggled men on Christmas 1776, the night before the Battle of Trenton.

Consider the backdrop: For the six months since the Declaration of Independence, Americans had been in almost constant retreat. To a disinterested observer, the American cause must have seemed hopelessly quixotic. To many patriots as well, it appeared all but lost. But Paine’s stirring words helped give the troops the morale boost they needed. The next day they accomplished the impossible, capturing nearly the entire force arrayed against them. Desertions plummeted and reenlistments soared.

Lovers of liberty need a little Paine today in the face of all the pain around us. It seems at times that the world has gone mad. Companies that lose billions are being bailed out by a government that loses trillions. The same federal Leviathan that outlaws competition in first-class mail delivery but still can’t deliver letters at a profit now supposedly knows how to run auto companies, banks, and insurance firms. Debt, deficits, bureaucracy, regulation, government spending—the depressing stuff already in frightful superabundance pre-financial crisis—now threaten our diminishing liberties more than ever before. The cover of the March 15 issue of Newsweek proclaimed, “We Are All Socialists Now.”

No Sunshine Soldiers

Maybe we have good reason to feel like those dispirited troops on Christmas Day in 1776, but we should learn from what they did just a day later. We can either be summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, or we can let the very principles we profess be our rallying cry for the battles ahead.

Eternal optimist though I am, I admit that pessimism really tugs at me when I read the morning papers. At every speech I give these days, there’s a sizable portion of the crowd that seems ready to crawl under a rock and let the world go to a statist hell in a hand basket.

But then I ask myself, what good purpose could a defeatist attitude possibly promote? Will it make me work harder for the causes I know are right? Is there anything about liberty that an election or events in Congress disproves? If I exude a pessimistic demeanor, will it help attract newcomers to the ideas I believe in? Is this the first time in history that believers in liberty have lost some battles? If we simply throw in the towel, will that enhance the prospects for future victories? Is our cause so menial as to justify deserting it because of some bad news or some new challenges? Do we turn back just because the hill we have to climb got a little steeper?

Readers of this magazine should know the answers to those questions.

This is not the time to abandon time-honored principles. I can’t speak for you but someday I want to go to my reward and be able to look back and say, “I never gave up. I never became part of the problem I tried to solve. I never gave the other side the luxury of winning anything without a rigorous, intellectual contest. I never missed an opportunity to do my best for what I believed in, and it never mattered what the odds or the obstacles were.”

A Tradition of Courage

Remember that we stand on the shoulders of many people who came before us and who persevered through far darker times. The American patriots who shed their blood and suffered through unspeakable hardships as they took on the world’s most powerful nation in 1776 are certainly among them. But I am also thinking of the brave men and women behind the Iron Curtain who resisted the greatest tyranny of the modern age, and won. I think of those like Hayek and Mises who kept the flame of liberty flickering in the 1930s and ’40s. I think of the heroes like Wilberforce and Clarkson who fought to end slavery and literally changed the conscience and character of a nation in the face of the most daunting of disadvantages. And I think of the Scots who, 456 years before the Declaration of Independence, put their lives on the line to repel English invaders with these thrilling words: “It is not for honor or glory or wealth that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.”

As I think about what some of those great men and women faced, the obstacles before us today seem rather puny. We just need to gird our loins. We have to get a lot smarter and better at reaching more fellow citizens with a compelling alternative to the dead hand of the corrupt and incompetent State. We need to put confident smiles on our faces and sally forth.

Time to Rally

We should not squander a second feeling bad for ourselves. This is a moment when our true character, the stuff we’re really made of, will show itself. If we retreat, that would tell me we were never really worthy of the battle in the first place. But if we resolve to let these tough times build character and rally our dispirited friends to new levels of dedication, we will look back on this occasion someday with pride at how we handled it. Have you called a friend yet today to explain to him or her why liberty should be a top priority?

Nobody ever promised that liberty would be easy to attain or easy to keep. The world has always been full of greedy thieves and thugs, narcissistic power seekers, snake-oil charlatans, unprincipled ne’er-do-wells, and arrogant busybodies. Sometimes they’re nattily dressed in custom-tailored, pin-stripe suits and give good speeches; sometimes they’re bedecked in jewel-studded robes and give lousy speeches; on yet other occasions they wear well-worn street clothes and don’t bother with a speech at all as they hold you up. It doesn’t matter how they’re dressed or what they say. No true friend of liberty should just roll over and play dead for any of them.

Wipe that frown off your face and get to work. Liberty’s future depends on you.

20 November 2010

The Washington Post had an article about the pay of college executives. Just 6 years ago there wasn't a single college president making over $1 million. Today there are 30. You know, eventually it's going to get to the point, if it hasn't already, where parents are going to have to ask whether the return on investment for going to these universities is worthwhile.

Kay Hymowitz has written a great article about the damage that happens to children when their parents break up. The damage continues to worsen with every transition their parents put them through. That is, everytime their parent bring a new boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife into the picture the problems deepen for those kids. I can't stress enough how valuable it is for kids to have a stable home life. We, as parents, are not doing our kids any favors by thinking of ourselves first. We're practically guaranteeing them a life of misery if we don't work on our marriages.

William Falk has unintentionally highlighted the problem with government-run health care. If we put the federal government in charge we eliminate the ability of an individual or family to make decisions for themselves. If the government is the final arbiter of what can or cannot be paid for then our health care options are left to the whims of a faceless bureaucrat and the corporations or groups that successfully lobby them. That doesn't seem like an option that expands our freedoms.

18 November 2010

Look, the reality is that there is significant risk to the lender in making these loans. That risk HAS to be offset by higher costs to the loan recipient. There are certain fixed costs of running a business that these pay-day lenders can't get around and if they were charging 6% interest on $300 loans they would go out of business and that doesn't serve the people who need their services. No one is being forced into a contract with a gun to their head here. The government shouldn't be involved in dictating terms of contracts. The government's role is to enforce contract law, not dictate the terms.

Really? The government is allowed to tell us what we can eat? Is that the kind of world you want to live in? If you don't want the FDA telling you what to eat send them an email at consumer@fda.gov or call them at (888)723-3366.

Bill Gates makes a great argument for free trade and not worrying about other countries improving their capabilities and economies. It doesn't hurt us to have other countries prosper.

Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game. If tomorrow some other country invented cheap energy with no CO2 output, would that be a bad day or a good day? For anybody who's reasonable, that would be, like, the best day ever. If all you care about is America's relative position, every day since the end of World War II has really been bad for you. So when somebody says to me, "Oh, the Chinese are helping to lower the cost of it, or creating something that emits less CO2," I say, "Great." The Chinese are also working on new drugs. When your children get sick, they might be able to take those drugs.

Peggy Noonan wrote a great article about Sarah Palin constantly invoking Ronald Reagan. Sarah Palin seems oblivious to the fact that, unlike her, Ronald Reagan actually had a track record that was enviable and a history of successful, intelligent writings about conservative philosophy. I cannot for the life of me figure out why so many conservatives are wild about Sarah Palin. Sure, she seems like a nice person who has tried to raise a good family, but she is not qualified to be President and she is not who we should be turning to to find out who to vote for.

I've included an excerpt from Peggy Noonan's editorial below.

The tea party provided the fire and passion of the election, and helped produce major wins—Marco Rubio by 19 points! But in the future the tea party is going to have to ask itself: is this candidate electable? Will he pass muster with those who may not themselves be deeply political but who hold certain expectations as to the dignity and stature required of those who hold office?

This is the key question the tea party will face in 2012. And it will be hard to answer it, because the tea party doesn't have leaders or conventions, so the answer will have to bubble up from a thousand groups, from 10,000leaders.

Conservatives talked a lot about Ronald Reagan this year, but they have to take him more to heart, because his example here is a guide. All this seemed lost last week on Sarah Palin, who called him, on Fox, "an actor." She was defending her form of policical celebrity—reality show, "Dancing With the Stars," etc. This is how she did it: "Wasn't Ronald Reagan an actor? Wasn't he in 'Bedtime for Bonzo,' Bozo, something? Ronald Reagan was an actor."

Excuse me, but this was ignorant even for Mrs. Palin. Reagan people quietly flipped their lids, but I'll voice their consternation to make a larger point. Ronald Reagan was an artist who willed himself into leadership as president of a major American labor union (Screen Actors Guild, seven terms, 1947-59.) He led that union successfully through major upheavals (the Hollywood communist wars, labor-management struggles); discovered and honed his ability to speak persuasively by talking to workers on the line at General Electric for eight years; was elected to and completed two full terms as governor of California; challenged and almost unseated an incumbent president of his own party; and went on to popularize modern conservative political philosophy without the help of a conservative infrastructure. Then he was elected president.

The point is not "He was a great man and you are a nincompoop," though that is true. The point is that Reagan's career is a guide, not only for the tea party but for all in politics. He brought his fully mature, fully seasoned self into politics with him. He wasn't in search of a life when he ran for office, and he wasn't in search of fame; he'd already lived a life, he was already well known, he'd accomplished things in the world.

Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service. And you need actual talent: You have to be able to bring people in and along. You can't just bully them, you can't just assert and taunt, you have to be able to persuade.

Americans don't want, as their representatives, people who seem empty or crazy. They'll vote no on that.

28 October 2010

John Stossel just wrote a great article about the hysteria and hype about "evil" BPA in plastic bottles. You can find it at this site. Here are some excerpts:

Richard Sharpe of the University of Edinburgh explained:

"Some early animal studies produced results suggesting the possibility of adverse effects relevant to human health, but much larger, carefully designed studies in several laboratories have failed to confirm these initial studies."

Yet many people are sure BPA causes not only breast and prostate cancer but also obesity, diabetes, attention deficit hyperactivity, autism, liver disease, ovarian disease, disease of the uterus, low sperm count, and heart disease. When a chemical is said to cause so many disorders, that's a sure sign of unscientific hysteria.

"Since BPA became commonplace in the lining of canned goods, food-borne illness from canned foods—including botulism—has virtually disappeared," says the American Council of Science and Health.

In the film, toxicologist Dr. Stephen King says that we should be "horrified" at all those chemicals. But when we called King, he sent us a study saying "testing" reveals a surprising array of chemical contaminants in every bottled water brand analyzed—at levels no different from those routinely found in tap water.

11 October 2010

I thought this was an interesting video. I'm a big believer in a loser-pays system to eliminate the ridiculous lawsuits that are clogging our legal system. The most common objection is that poor plaintiffs would be unable to bring a suit. Ms. Gryphon, who has studied the loser-pay systems that are almost everywhere else in the world except the U.S., says there is already a solution for that problem.

This is a perfect example of the stonewalling and obfuscation that is endemic to all levels of government. Mr. Gruber, town manager of Atherton, California, is the poster child for what is wrong with our government. He should be displayed before world as a pathetic, thieving bureaucrat. He receives $145,000 per year in salary and is either incredibly incompetent or purposefully disobedient to the law. Please share this with your friends, particularly those who continue to place their faith in government to help us.

17 August 2010

Unions consistently put the interests of their members ahead of the interest of the people they claim to serve. Teachers unions are far more interested in getting more members than they are in providing better education for your children

31 July 2010

I'm posting this article here for a friend, but really this article is something that everyone should read. If you want to know why we should keep the electoral college, read this.

From the Archive: Math Against Tyranny

by Will Hively

published online October 1, 2004

This article about the electoral college originally appeared in the November 1996 issue of Discover. Some of our readers thought it would be a good idea to feature it again this election year. We agree.—The editors

When
you cast your vote this month, you're not directly electing the
president—you're electing members of the electoral college. They elect
the president. An archaic, unnecessary system? Mathematics shows, says
one concerned American, that by giving your vote to another, you're
ensuring the future of our democracy.

"One morning at two
o’clock," Alan Natapoff recalls, "I realized that I was the only person
willing to see this problem through to the end." The morning in question
was back in the late 1970s. Then as now, Natapoff, a physicist, was
spending his days doing research at MIT’s Man-Vehicle Laboratory,
investigating how the human brain responds to acceleration, weightless
floating, and other vexations of contemporary transport. But the problem
he was working on so late involved larger and grander issues. He was
contemplating the survival of our nation as we know it.

Not long
before Natapoff’s epiphany, Congress had teetered on the verge of
wrecking the electoral college, an institution that has no equal
anywhere in the world. This group of ordinary citizens, elected by all
who vote, elects, in turn, the nation’s president and vice president.
Though the college still stood, Natapoff worried that sometime soon,
well-meaning reformers might try again to destroy it. The only way to
prevent such a tragedy, he thought, would be to get people to understand
the real but hidden value of our peculiar, roundabout voting procedure.
He’d have to dig down to basic principles. He’d have to give them a mathematical explanation of why we need the electoral college.

Natapoff’s self-chosen labor has taken him more than two decades. But now that the journal Public Choice
is about to publish his groundbreaking article, he can finally relax a
bit; he might even take a vacation. In addition to this nontechnical
article, which skimps on the math, he’s worked out a formal theorem that
demonstrates, he claims, why our complex electoral system is "provably"
better than a simple, direct election. Furthermore, he adds, without
this quirky glitch in the system, our democracy might well have fallen
apart long ago into warring factions.

This month many of us are
playing our allotted role in the drama that’s haunted Natapoff for so
long. Ostensibly, by voting on November 5, we are choosing the next
president of the United States. Nine weeks after the apparent winner
celebrates victory, however, Congress will count not our votes but those
of 538 "electors," distributed proportionally among the states. Each
state gets as many electoral votes as it has seats in
Congress--California has 54, New York has 33, the seven least populated
states have 3 each; the District of Columbia also has 3. These 538 votes
actually elect the president. And the electors who cast them don’t
always choose the popular-vote winner. In 1888, the classic example,
Grover Cleveland got 48.6 percent of the popular vote versus Benjamin
Harrison’s 47.9 percent. Cleveland won by 100,456 votes. But the
electors chose Harrison, overwhelmingly (233 to 168). They were not
acting perversely. According to the rules laid out in the Constitution,
Harrison was the winner.

Some reversals have been more
complicated. In 1824, Andrew Jackson beat his rival, John Quincy Adams,
by more popular and then more electoral votes--99 versus 84--but still
lost the election because he didn’t win a majority of electoral
votes (78 went to other candidates). When that happens, the House of
Representatives picks the winner. In 1876, Samuel J. Tilden lost to
Rutherford B. Hayes by one electoral vote, though he received 50.9
percent of the popular vote to Hayes’s 47.9 percent; an extraordinary
commission awarded 20 disputed electoral votes to Hayes. We’ve also had
some famous close calls. In 1960, John F. Kennedy narrowly beat Richard
Nixon in the popular voting, 49.7 percent to 49.5 percent, a smaller
margin than Cleveland had over Harrison. But wait: Nixon won more states
(Nixon 26, Kennedy and others 24). But no: Kennedy, who won bigger
states, went on to win the electoral balloting, 303 to 219. This time
we, the people, did not strike out. The popular-vote winner became
president.

Clearly, in U.S. presidential elections, it ain’t
over till it’s over. A popular-vote loser in the big national contest
can still win by scoring more points in the smaller electoral college.
But isn’t this undemocratic? Isn’t it somehow wrong that a few hundred
obscure electors, foisted on a new republic by men of property in
powdered wigs, should be allowed to reverse the people’s choice?

By
1969, Congress was beginning to think so. After Nixon defeated Hubert
Humphrey with a popular margin, again, of less than 1 percent, the
possibility of a modern-day winner’s being denied the presidency had
become so obnoxious to the House of Representatives that it approved a
constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college. The American
Bar Association supported the move, calling our current electoral system
"archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous."
In the Senate, too, the amendment had broad support. What could be
simpler or fairer than electing the president by direct popular vote?
Over the next few years the issue lost momentum, but Jimmy Carter’s
narrow victory over Gerald Ford in 1976 brought it back to life. The
League of Women Voters, a host of political scientists, and a large
majority of American citizens, according to various polls, all agreed
that the electoral college should be abolished. In 1977, though, among
those testifying against the amendment was a self-described political
nobody from Massachusetts: Alan Natapoff.

Leafing now through the Congressional Record,
Natapoff laughs. "The impact of my testimony," he says, "was
negligible." He hadn’t yet proved his theorem, and the mathematical
argument he did present was edited to a "blunted" paraphrase, leaving
out some of his most important arguments. The electoral college
survived, of course, but not because of anything Natapoff said. After a
decade of sporadic debate and 4,395 pages of testimony, the bill died in
the Senate. It had majority support, but not the two-thirds majority
required to pass it.

The issue will likely catch fire again,
though, the moment another popular winner fails to muster the 270
electoral votes needed to clinch victory. "Raw voting, having the
president elected by a popular vote, is deep in the American psyche,"
Natapoff says. It’s been around since Andrew Jackson finally won the
presidency--four years later than he should have, according to 153,544
raw, frustrated voters. "My theorem," Natapoff admits, "contradicts the
common wisdom of our time. Everybody gets this wrong. Everybody. Because
we were taught incorrectly."

Natapoff included. How could a boy
who grew up in the Bronx, played ball in the streets, and attended
public schools in New York City not have absorbed the common wisdom?
Natapoff went on to study particle physics at Berkeley. Later, at mit,
he changed his field of research but not his belief in raw, popular
democracy. Then one day in the 1960s, he saw an article in Life
that changed his mind. It quoted political experts who said the
electoral college robs voters of their power. But the mathematics these
experts were using seemed too simple to support their conclusion.
Natapoff looked into the math, and pretty soon he reached the opposite
conclusion. Almost always, he convinced himself, our electoral system increases
voters’ power. The experts had not considered enough cases; they looked
only at unbelievably close elections with two candidates running neck
and neck everywhere in the country. Real elections are almost never that
closely contested. Some states tilt sharply toward one candidate or
another, and the voting power of individuals in each state changes in
ways the reformers’ arguments ignored.

The more Natapoff looked
into the nitty-gritty of real elections, the more parallels he found
with another American institution that stirs up wild passions in the
populace. The same logic that governs our electoral system, he saw, also
applies to many sports--which Americans do, intuitively, understand. In
baseball’s World Series, for example, the team that scores the most
runs overall is like a candidate who gets the most votes. But to become
champion, that team must win the most games. In 1960, during a
World Series as nail-bitingly close as that year’s presidential battle
between Kennedy and Nixon, the New York Yankees, with the awesome
slugging combination of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, and Bill "Moose"
Skowron, scored more than twice as many total runs as the Pittsburgh
Pirates, 55 to 27. Yet the Yankees lost the series, four games to three.
Even Natapoff, who grew up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, conceded
that Pittsburgh deserved to win. "Nobody walked away saying it was
unfair," he says.

Runs must be grouped in a way that wins games,
just as popular votes must be grouped in a way that wins states. The
Yankees won three blowouts (16-3, 10-0, 12-0), but they couldn’t come up
with the runs they needed in the other four games, which were close.
"And that’s exactly how Cleveland lost the series of 1888," Natapoff
continues. "Grover Cleveland. He lost the five largest states by a
close margin, though he carried Texas, which was a thinly populated
state then, by a large margin. So he scored more runs, but he lost the
five biggies." And that was fair, too. In sports, we accept that a true
champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A champion
should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by
every means available--bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling
plays in the field--and not just smack home runs against second-best
pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic,
should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play
strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.

"Experts,
scholars, deep thinkers could make errors on electoral reform,"
Natapoff decided, "but nine-year-olds could explain to a Martian why the
Yankees lost in 1960, and why it was right. And both have the same
underlying abstract principle."

These insights came quickly, but
it was many years before Natapoff devised his formal mathematical
proof. His starting point was the concept of voting power. In a fair
election, he saw, each voter’s power boils down to this: What is the
probability that one person’s vote will be able to turn a national
election? The higher the probability, the more power each voter
commands. To figure out these probabilities, Natapoff devised his own
model of a national electorate--a more realistic model, he thought, than
the ones the quoted experts were always using. Almost always, he found,
individual voting power is higher when funneled through districts--such
as states--than when pooled in one large, direct election. It is more
likely, in other words, that your one vote will determine the outcome in
your state and your state will then turn the outcome of the electoral
college, than that your vote will turn the outcome of a direct national
election. A voter therefore, Natapoff found, has more power under the
current electoral system.

Why worry how easily one vote can turn
an election, so long as each voter has equal power? One person, one
vote--that’s all the math anyone needs to know in a simple, direct
election. Natapoff agrees that voters should have equal power. "The
idea," he says, "is to give every voter the largest equal share
of national voting power possible." Here’s a classic example of equal
voting power: under a tyranny, everyone’s power is equal to zero.
Clearly, equality alone is not enough. In a democracy, individuals
become less vulnerable to tyranny as their voting power increases.

James
Madison, chief architect of our nation’s electoral college, wanted to
protect each citizen against the most insidious tyranny that arises in
democracies: the massed power of fellow citizens banded together in a
dominant bloc. As Madison explained in The Federalist Papers
(Number X), "a well-constructed Union" must, above all else, "break and
control the violence of faction," especially "the superior force of an .
. . overbearing majority." In any democracy, a majority’s power
threatens minorities. It threatens their rights, their property, and
sometimes their lives.

A well-designed electoral system might
include obstacles to thwart an overbearing majority. But direct,
national voting has none. Under raw voting, a candidate has every
incentive to woo only the largest bloc-- say, Serbs in Yugoslavia. If a
Serb party wins national power, minorities have no prospect of throwing
them out; 49 percent will never beat 51 percent. Knowing this, the
majority can do as it pleases (lacking other effective checks and
balances). But in a districted election, no one becomes president
without winning a large number of districts, or "states"- -say, two of
the following three: Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Candidates thus have
an incentive to campaign for non-Serb votes in at least some of those
states and to tone down extreme positions--in short, to make elections
less risky events for the losers. The result, as George Wallace used to
say, may often be a race without "a dime’s worth of difference" between
two main candidates, which he viewed as a weakness but others view as a
strength of our system.

The founding fathers were not experts on
voting power. Many wanted an electoral college simply because they
distrusted the mob. A large electorate, they believed, falls prey to
passions, rumors, and "tumult." Electors were supposed to consider each
candidate’s merits more judiciously, not blindly follow the popular
will. Nowadays, of course, whoever wins the popular vote in any state
wins all the electoral votes in that state automatically (except in
Maine, which divides its electoral votes). We no longer need human
bodies to cast electoral ballots, Natapoff says. That part of the system
is indeed archaic. But it has worked beautifully, he insists, as a
formula for converting one large national contest into 51 smaller
elections in which individual voters have more clout. The Madisonian
system, by requiring candidates to win states on the way to winning the
nation, has forced majorities to win the consent of minorities, checked
the violence of factions, and held the country together. "We have
stumbled onto something that not everyone appreciates," Natapoff says.
"People should understand it before they decide to change it."

Which
is why, late one night a couple of decades back, with a minimum of
fanfare, Natapoff appointed himself unofficial mathematician for one of
the least popular institutions in America.

Two variables,
Natapoff realized, profoundly affect each citizen’s voting power. One is
the size of the electorate, a factor that political scientists already
recognized. The other is the closeness of the contest, which most
experts hadn’t taken into account.

It’s easy to see the effect
of size. Your vote matters less in a larger pool of votes: it’s the same
drop in a bigger bucket and less likely to change the outcome of an
election. However, in a ridiculously small nation of, say, three
voters, your vote would carry immense power. An election would turn on
your ballot 50 percent of the time. For a simple example, let’s assume
that only two candidates are running, A versus B, and each vote is like a
random coin toss, with a 50 percent chance of going either way. In your
nation of three, there’s a 50 percent chance that the other two voters
will split, one for A and the other for B, and thus a 50 percent chance
that your single vote will determine the election. There’s also, of
course, a 25 percent chance both will vote for A and a 25 percent chance
both will vote for B, making your vote unimportant. But that potential
tie-splitting power puts all voters in a powerful position; candidates
will give each of you a lot of respect.

As a nation gets larger,
each citizen’s voting power shrinks. When Natapoff computes voting
power--the probability that one vote will turn the election--he is
really computing the probability that the rest of the nation will
deadlock. If you are part of a five-voter nation, the other four voters
would have to split--two for A and two for B--for your vote to turn the
election. The probability of that happening is 3 in 8, or 37.5 percent.
(The other possibilities are three votes for A and one for B, a 25
percent probability; three for B and one for A, also 25 percent; four
for A, 6.25 percent; and four for B, 6.25 percent.) As the nation’s size
goes up, individual voting power continues to drop, roughly as the
square root of size. Among 135 citizens, for instance, there are so many
ways the others can divide and make your vote meaningless--say, 66 for A
and 68 for B--that the probability of deadlock drops to 6.9 percent. In
the 1960 presidential race, one of the closest ever, more than 68
million voters went to the polls. A deadlock would have been 34,167,371
votes for Kennedy and the same for Nixon (also-rans not included).
Instead, Kennedy squeaked past Nixon 34,227,096 to 34,107,646. You might
as well try to balance a pencil on its point as try to swing a modern
U.S. election with one vote. In a typical large election, individuals or
small groups of voters have little chance of being critical to a
raw-vote victory, and they therefore have little bargaining power with a
prospective president.

So, does this historic example
demonstrate how the electoral college compensates for our individual
insignificance? Wasn’t each vote for Kennedy or Nixon actually more
important than the raw vote count suggests, being funneled through the
electoral college? If a couple thousand votes had changed in a key state
or two. . . ? Actually, no--if the experts’ assumptions are
true. If each vote really is like a toss of those perfectly balanced
coins so beloved by theorists, then districting never boosts voting
power. It’s actually a useless complication; it slightly reduces
individual power. You can see this in a small electorate. If you
district a nation of nine into three states with three voters each, with
each vote a perfect toss-up, the probability of a deadlock in your
state is 50 percent. Your vote would then decide the outcome in your
state. Beyond that, the other two states must also deadlock, one going
for A and one for B, to make your state’s outcome decisive for the
nation. The probability of that is also 50 percent. So the compound
probability of the whole election hinging on your vote is 25 percent. In
a simple, direct election, on the other hand, the national pool of
eight other voters would have to split four against four to make your
vote decisive. The probability of that happening is 27.3 percent
(35/128), giving you more power in a direct election. Districting
doesn’t help this nation of nine, and it doesn’t help any electorate of
any size when the contest is perfectly even.

Thus the experts
who wanted to reform our system were right, but only if you grant them
one large assumption. An electoral college does rob voters of power if
everyone, in effect, walks into a voting booth and flips a coin to
decide between two equally appealing candidates, Tweedledee and
Tweedledum. "But this is an inaccurate model," Natapoff counters. "They
were going to change the Constitution based on a narrow finding."

Natapoff
decided to push the analysis further, even though the math got harder
as he shed convenient, simplifying assumptions. He wanted to know what
happens when voters stop acting like ideal, perfect coins and begin to
favor one candidate over the other. He could see right away that
everyone’s voting power shrinks, because the probability goes down that
the electorate will deadlock. The national tally is more likely to be
lopsided, just as a tail-heavy coin is more likely to come up, say, 60
heads and 40 tails than 50-50.

A general preference for one
candidate over the other is like a house advantage in gambling. "If
candidate A has a 1 percent edge on every vote," Natapoff says, "in
100,000 votes he’s almost sure to win. And that’s bad for the individual
voter, whose vote then doesn’t make any difference in the outcome. The
leading candidate becomes the house."

Of course, you might
object, voters aren’t really roulette wheels. When you walk into the
voting booth, you’ve probably already made up your mind which candidate
you’ll vote for. If it’s A, the probability that you’ll pull the lever
for B instead isn’t 45 percent, it’s more like 0 percent. Similarly, if
your brother-in-law is a strong supporter of B, the probability that
he’ll actually vote for B is close to 100 percent, not 45 percent.
Although many people get hung up on this part of Natapoff’s argument,
it’s not really that hard to understand. Imagine for a moment that
you’re not a person at all, but a voting booth. When someone steps in to
cast a vote, you have no idea whether that vote will be for A or for B.
The voter may have made up her mind long ago, but until she actually
pulls the lever, you won’t know whom she’s chosen. All you know is that
of the people whose votes you count today, about 55 percent will vote
for A and about 45 percent for B. Similarly, a spin of the roulette
wheel isn’t really random. The laws of physics, the shape of the ball,
the currents in the air, and other factors will all determine where the
ball lands. But a gambler can’t calculate those factors any more than a
voting booth can know which candidate an individual voter will choose.

In
a nation of 135 citizens, says Natapoff, one person’s probability of
turning an election is 6.9 percent in a dead-even contest. But if voter
preference for candidate A jumps to, say, 55 percent, the probability of
deadlock, and of your one vote turning the election, falls below .4
percent, a huge drop. If candidate A goes out in front by 61 percent,
the probability that one vote will matter whooshes down to .024 percent.
And it keeps on dropping, faster and faster, as candidate A keeps
pulling ahead.

The next step is the kicker. The effect of
lopsided preferences, Natapoff discovered, is far more important than
the size effect. In a dead- even contest, remember, voting power shrinks
as the electorate becomes larger. But a 1 or 2 percent change in
electorate size, by itself, doesn’t matter much to the individual voter.
When one candidate gains an edge over another, however, a 1 or 2
percent change can make a huge difference to everyone’s voting power,
giving candidates less of a motive to keep the losers happy. And the
larger the electorate, the more telling a candidate’s lead becomes, like
a house advantage.

Some people know this from ordinary
experience. If you’re gambling in a casino, for instance, you had better
keep your session as short as possible; the longer you play, the less
likely you are to beat the house odds and break even (let alone win). By
the same principle, if you’re flipping a lopsided coin yet looking for
an equal number of heads and tails (a deadlock), you had better keep the
number of coin flips low; the longer you try with lopsided coins, the
more the law of averages works against a 50-50 outcome. And if you’re
voting in an uneven election, you had better keep the electorate’s size
as small as possible. "If the law of averages has got an edge," Natapoff
says, "it’s going to tell in the long run. And so the idea is not to
allow any very large elections if you are a voter. Unless the contest is
perfectly even, you want to keep the size of elections small." The
founding fathers unwittingly did this when they divided the national
election into smaller, state-size contests.

So even though
districting doesn’t help in an ideal, dead-even contest, with voters
acting the same all over the country, it does help, Natapoff saw, in a
realistic, uneven contest. Sports fans, again, vaguely understand the
underlying principle. In a championship series, the contest becomes more
equal, and the underdog has a better chance, when a team has to win
more games, not just score more points. Similarly, when contesting 50
states, the leading candidate has more ways to lose than when running in
a large, raw national election--there are more ways for votes to
cluster in harmless blowouts, just as there are more ways for runs or
goals to cluster in the seven games of the World Series or the Stanley
Cup play-offs. In a big, raw national contest, those clusters wouldn’t
matter.

The degree to which districting helps, Natapoff found,
depends on just how close a contest is. Take as an illustration our
model nation of 135, divided into, say, three states of 45 citizens
each. When the race is dead even, of course, no districting scheme
helps: voting power starts off at 6.9 percent in a direct election
versus 6.0 percent in a districted election. But when candidate A jumps
ahead with a lead of 54.5 percent, individual voting power is roughly
the same whether the nation uses districts or not. And as the contest
becomes more lopsided, voting power shrinks faster in the direct-voting
nation than it does in the districted nation. If candidate A grabs a
61.1 percent share of voter preference, voters in the districted nation
have twice as much power as those in the direct-voting nation. If A’s
share reaches 64.8 percent, voters in the districted nation have four
times as much power, and so on. The advantage of districting over direct
voting keeps growing quickly as the contest becomes more lopsided.

Natapoff
now had a two-part result. A districted voting scheme can either
decrease individual voting power or boost it, depending on how lopsided
the coin being tossed for each voter becomes. He found the crossover
point interesting. For a nation of 135, that point is right around a
55-45 percent split in voter preference between two candidates. In any
contest closer than this, voters would have more power in a simple,
direct election. In any contest more lopsided than this, they would be
better off voting by districts. How does that crossover point shift,
Natapoff wondered, as electorate size changes?

For very small
electorates--nine people, say--he found that the gap between candidates
must be very large, at least 66.6 to 33.3 percent, before districting
will help. That’s why raw voting works well at town meetings, where
electorates are so small. As the number of voters gets larger, the
crossover point moves closer to 50-50. For a nation of 135, voters are
better off with districting in any race more lopsided than 55- 45. For a
nation with millions of voters, the gap between candidates must be
razor-thin for districting not to help. In the real world of
large nations and uneven contests, voters get more bang for their ballot
when they set up a districted, Madisonian electoral system--usually a
lot more.

Now, try to imagine a bleary-eyed Natapoff working
through the math for case after case. He finds out what happens as the
size of the electorate changes, as the contest gets more or less
lopsided, or as the method of districting changes (in his most favored
nation of 135, you could have 3 states of 45 citizens each, 45 states of
3 citizens each--even 5 states of 20 and 7 states of 5). All these
things affect voting power. Natapoff’s theorem now covers all cases.
"The theorem," he sums up, "essentially says that you’re better off
districted in any large election, unless every voter in the
country is alike and very closely balanced between candidates A and B.
In that very extraordinary case, which rarely if ever occurs in our
elections, it would be better to have a simple national election."

Natapoff
had finally answered, to his satisfaction, the question that had nagged
him for decades. But what size, shape, and composition should our
districts have? Like everyone else who delves into electoral politics,
Natapoff could see that the actual, historic United States is not a
perfectly districted nation. For one thing, states vary enormously in
size. Natapoff can solve his equations to find an ideal district size
for the purpose of national elections, assuming that each vote, like a
coin toss, is statistically independent--but the answer depends on an
election’s closeness. The districts could all be the same size, but only
if the preference for one candidate over another is the same everywhere
in the country. In general, the more lopsided the contest, the smaller
each district, or state, needs to be to give individual voters the best
chance of local deadlock. So in close elections, voters in larger states
would have more power; in lopsided elections, voters in smaller states
would. Since some campaigns run neck and neck to the wire while others
become blowouts, we will probably never have an ideally districted
nation for any particular election, even with equal-size states.

Ideally,
too, no bloc should dominate any district. This consideration, by
itself, probably makes the 50 states a grid that’s closer to ideal for
electoral voting than, say, the 435 congressional districts. For
example, in heavily black districts, no single white or black
person’s vote would be likely to change the outcome, if blacks in that
district tend to vote as a bloc. Each of those voters, black and white,
would have more national power in a districting scheme more closely
balanced between black and white. For this reason, Natapoff says,
gerrymandering can be counterproductive even when undertaken with the
intention of boosting some national minority’s power. The gerrymandered
district might guarantee one seat in Congress to this minority, but
those voters might actually wield more national bargaining power with no
seat in Congress if representatives from, say, three separate districts
viewed their votes as potentially swinging an election. Anyway,
Natapoff says, the point of districting is to reduce the death grip of
blocs on the outcome. "This is a nonpartisan proposition," he says. "The
idea is to be sure all votes in a district have power." Ideally no
single party, race, ethnic group, or other bloc, nationally large or
nationally small, will dominate any of the districts-- which for now
happen to be the 50 states plus Washington, D.C.

Natapoff
concedes that the Madisonian system does contain within it one small,
unavoidable paradox. Every once in a while, if we use districting to
jack up individual voting power, we’ll have an electoral "anomaly"--a
loser like Harrison will nudge out a slightly more popular Cleveland. He
sees those anomalies, as well as the more frequent close calls, not as
defects but as signs that the system is working. It is protecting
individual voting power by preserving the threat that small numbers of
votes in this or that district can turn the election. "We were blinded
by its minor vices," he says. "All that happens is someone with fewer
votes gets elected," temporarily. What doesn’t happen may be far more
important. In 1888, victorious Republicans didn’t celebrate by jailing
or killing Democrats, and Democrats didn’t find Harrison so intolerable
that they took up arms. Cleveland came back to win four years later,
beating Harrison under the same rules as before. The republic survived.

One
other benefit attributed by Natapoff to our electoral college seems
almost aesthetic. As usual, it’s easier to appreciate in sports. In
1960, under simpler rules, the Yankees might have been champions. They
might have won, for instance, if there were no World Series but only the
scheduled 154-game season, with one large baseball nation of 16 teams
instead of two separate leagues. The team winning the most games all
year long would simply pick up its prize in October. Instead, here is
what happened. By the ninth inning in game seven of the series, the
Yankees and Pirates had fought to a standstill--the ultimate deadlock.
Each team had won three games. The Yankees had led throughout much of
game seven, but Pittsburgh astonished everyone by scoring five runs in
the eighth inning, after a Yankee fielding error, to go ahead 9-7. They
couldn’t, of course, hold their lead. The Yankees answered with two more
runs in the top of the ninth to tie the score at 9-9.

Then, in
the bottom of the ninth, Bill Mazeroski, an average hitter without much
power, stepped to the plate for Pittsburgh. He seemed a mere
placeholder--until his long fly ball just cleared the left-field wall.
Rounding second base, halfway home, Mazeroski was leaping for joy, and
Pittsburgh fans were pouring from their seats, racing to meet him at the
plate. The Yankees had finally toppled. There they were, ahead in the
polls, piling up votes like nobody’s business, until one last swing of
one player’s bat turned the whole season around. "Everybody regarded it
as one of the most glorious World Series ever," Natapoff says. "To do it
any other way would totally destroy the degree of competition and
excitement that’s essential to all sports."

About a year ago, George Mason University (home to one of my favorite economists to read) put out a Freedom in the 50 States report. It is an interesting take on the freedom to be found on a state by state basis. Read it and go to page 17 to find out if you're living in the right state. (If you're living in New York, I'm sorry.)

29 July 2010

Thomas Donley wrote an editorial in Barron's this week on the failures of the state of California. One paragraph in particular stood out for me.

Joseph Vranich, a consultant in Irvine, keeps tabs on business emigration because he makes a good living helping companies depart. He calls himself a "business relocation coach," and business is booming. Using public information, he tallied 85 corporate departures, partial or complete, between Jan. 1 and July 20, 2010. That's twice as many as he counted in all of 2009, and nearly three times as many as in the three years before that.

Apparently California's ingenious plan to drive businesses out of the state is working. Mwuu ha ha!

28 July 2010

James Webb is a Democrat Senator from Virginia. In a recent Op-Ed he wrote:

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived....

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs....

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy....

The old South was a three-tiered society, with blacks and hard-put whites both dominated by white elites who manipulated racial tensions in order to retain power. At the height of slavery, in 1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that "fully three-fourths of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery."...

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white. The need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible, both in our markets and in our communities. Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.

How can it be that in America, the land of the free, we treat people differently with tax dollars and government favors. This is in direct opposition to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's vision and a perpetual shame to our country.

13 July 2010

Former San Francisco mayor and State Assembly speaker Willie Brown is becoming a high-profile champion of reforming California's public sector pension system. It's a strange but logical transformation for the staunchly utilitarian politician and practiced gladhander.

Earlier this year he wrote a widely-circulated column in the San Francisco Chronicle lamenting the "out of control" civil service: "The deal used to be that civil servants were paid less than private sector workers in exchange for an understanding that they had job security for life. But we politicians -- pushed by our friends in labor -- gradually expanded pay and benefits . . . while keeping the job protections and layering on incredibly generous retirement packages."

When I interviewed Mr. Brown in New York in March, he lamented that he hadn't anticipated the long-term implications of over-generous pensions: "When I was Speaker I was in charge of passing spending. When I became mayor I was in charge of paying for that spending. It was a wake-up call."

Governor Schwarzenegger wants the legislature to revoke certain pension reforms enacted in 1999, which made pensions much more generous. Mr. Brown may signal the emergence of other liberal allies calling reform, despite the opposition of powerful Democratic unions. The more that pension costs balloon, the less money is available for other programs -- including many dear to the hearts of progressives.

12 July 2010

There is a great interview in Business Week with Anne Lauvergeon who is the CEO of the French nuclear-power company Areva. Go read the whole thing, but here is an excerpt.

What are the arguments for nuclear power?First, it's a good way to produce a lot of electricity cheaply. Of course, you have to invest heavily at the beginning, but afterwards you have 60 years of electricity at a very predictable cost. You don't depend on other countries, and you have no CO2 emissions. But nuclear energy is not for everybody. You cannot build new nuclear plants in a country that is not stable, that is not managed with rationality.

What are you doing with the nuclear waste?First, you put a very small quantity of uranium into the plant. So at the end you have a very small quantity of nuclear waste. What to do with it? We are recycling 96 percent of this waste. You don't recycle in the U.S.

10 July 2010

I was pointed to this website showing police dash cam footage of a police officer detaining a freelance photographer who was standing in public right-of-way taking pictures of BP property for an assignment. That's disturbing enough, but later in the video around 6 minutes in a BP security guard shows up and starts asking the cop to give him this photographer's information. The photographer, rightly, asks if that's legal since BP is not a government agency. I was very disturbed by the cops response telling the photographer that BP is "a certain type of law enforcement". SINCE WHEN!!

When did an oil company suddenly become our duly elected and appointed law enforcement. This is the kind of bull that is driving citizens crazy. Our government representatives don't even know what the limits of their power are. Because, effectively, they have no limits anymore. They don't even pretend to have any kind of limits. Government is its own law and the citizen be damned.

08 July 2010

The April Issue of The Freeman had a great article on the problems with ethanol as a fuel. Here are a couple of snippets.

For starters, ethanol is an inferior energy source. Ethanol has 35 percent less energy by volume than regular unleaded gasoline. One gallon of E-10 gasoline (which contains 10 percent ethanol) is 3.6 percent less efficient than pure gasoline (ethanol-free, E-0). In other words, as the percentage of ethanol in a gallon of gas goes up, the realized miles per gallon go down. As a result, E-15 is 5 percent less efficient than E-0 gasoline and E-20 is 7.7 percent less efficient. E-85 gas is between 25 and 30 percent less efficient than pure E-0 gasoline.

Ethanol also has some nasty properties that politicians and the Big Corn lobby would rather not talk about. For starters, ethanol is corrosive to some metals, rubber, fiberglass, and plastic. This leads to higher maintenance costs and the need to replace parts sooner than would otherwise be the case. Older car engines, boat engines, motorcycles, snowmobiles, and small gas-powered tools (chain saws, snow blowers, lawn mowers, and weed whackers) are especially vulnerable to ethanol corrosion. Fine particles of rubber, plastic, or metal flow through the fuel system. These particles eventually clog the engine’s fuel lines, fuel filter, carburetor, and fuel injector. Ethanol can also cause an engine to burn out because it runs hotter.

05 July 2010

I was reading an article by James Payne, who has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins and Texas A&M, about why he and his wife have refused to have health insurance for years. I thought this quote was interesting:

Refusing health insurance may have advantages, but what will happen if I face a medical problem that requires more than my savings? To understand my answer, consider a parallel question about some other commodity—say, housing. I announce that I believe in paying for housing from my own financial resources. Someone points out there might be a house I want that costs more than I can afford. That’s just too bad: I don’t get to buy it. I limit my housing consumption according to my resources.

I look at medical care the same way: If something costs too much, I do without. This position, so obvious and sensible in other areas, is considered untenable when it comes to medical care. In this realm the prevailing assumption is that everyone is entitled to all the health services he needs or wants.

It's odd that our culture put so much emphasis on health care. I understand that we want quality of life, but I find it interesting that politicians and so many others see health care as a human right.

01 July 2010

This is the kind of condescending, dismissive politician who should be thrown out on his ___ come November! Pete Stark has been in office so long that he can't even find it in himself to hide the contempt he feels for his constituents. What a disgrace! He is the face of incumbency, as Chris Mathews stated. He is the poster child for why we should vote for ANYONE but the incumbent. If his only opponent were a dyed-in-the-wool communist I would vote for the opponent. Words can't even describe the depths to which I hate politicians like Pete Stark. They are EVERYTHING that is wrong with this country. Vote for his opponent!

21 June 2010

In general we may say that whatever is capable of procuring any advantage, even a frivolous pleasure, is useful. . . . [T]he measure of the utility of a thing, real or supposed, is the vivacity with which it is generally desired. . . . Now, how are we to fix the degrees of a thing so inappreciable as the vivacity of our desires? We have, however, a very sure manner of arriving at it. It is to observe the sacrifices to which these desires determine us. . . . [A]n exchange is a transaction in which the two contracting parties both gain. Whenever I make an exchange freely, and without constraint, it is because I desire the thing I receive more than that I give; and, on the contrary, he with whom I bargain desires what I offer more than that which he renders me.

Those who believe that trade is a zero-sum game seem blind to the fact that the gentleman who buys an iPad, for example, finds that iPad to be worth more to him than the $499 it costs him to buy it. To Apple, that $499 is more valuable than the iPad they are selling. Both parties win.

A new Washington Times article highlights an audit of Planned Parenthood that discovered that between 2002 and 2008 Planned Parenthood received about $2.3 billion. However, they are only able to account for $657 million in expenditures. This can't possibly surprise anyone, can it? A government funded organization that can't account for two-thirds of their income? I'm surprised it was only two-thirds.

20 June 2010

Max Borders has written a great article in the June issue of The Freeman about the problem with economic models. One of the main problems I have with Keynsians is their religious faith in their ability to model the economy. The Austrian economists would call this the height of arrogance to believe that an academic, or group of academics, can possibly know all inputs in the ecosystem that is the economy. Incidentally, that's also the main concern I have with climate modeling. Academics who attempt to model complex mechanisms involving thousands of inputs are not as smart as they would like you to believe.

09 May 2010

Inez Tanenbaum, Consumer Product Safety Commission Chairwoman, has vowed to ban the ubiquitous drop-side cribs that almost every family for that past 20 years has used. Why, you might ask? Because 32 children have died. In the last decade. Now before people call me insensitive, I'm the father of 5 children and my heart aches when I hear the tragic stories of people losing their children. However, the government simply cannot protect us from every risk. It can't, and it shouldn't. We don't need government intervening in every possible way that we can get hurt or die. How many millions of children in the last decade survived these cribs just fine. Many more children die from pool drownings. Should we ban those too?

Ms. Tenebaum needs to settle down and stop trying to justify her job. It's awful that 32 children have died in the last decade but it's not the government's job to protect us from every risk. Let's just take a breath and use some common sense.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen. - Frederic Basiat

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. - Adam Smith

The desire of bettering our condition, a desire which, though generally calm and dispassionate, comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the grave. - Adam Smith

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it. - Milton Friedman